And so it begins...

Perfect

A new Department of Cognitive Science is being created at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. Here is the call for a cluster hire (for around 10 faculty) in all areas of cognitive science, at both junior and senior levels: www.unibocconi.it/en/faculty-a... Deadline: May 4th, 2026

how it started/how it's going

Of all the analogies, this one about horses is the dumbest.

I've changed my mind - I think 'population collapse with the survivors remaining enslaved to the whims of their owners' makes horses a brilliant analogy for what happens if fully capable human-like AI ever really did take over our jobs.

Of all the analogies, this one about horses is the dumbest.

Wimsatt was my PhD advisor's advisor, and his work runs deep through much of my work. One of the greats.

Kansas is sending letters to trans people telling them that their licenses will be revoked as of tomorrow and that they risk arrest for driving on a suspended license. This is pure cruelty. www.erininthemorning.com/p/kansas-sen...

Interested in using my textbook, Modeling Social Behavior, but wishing code was in a more general programming language than NetLogo? The incomparable Ben Fried has translated all modeling code into JULIA, utilizing the excellent Agents.jl package. github.com/BenjaFried/m...

Interested in using my textbook, Modeling Social Behavior, but wishing code was in a more general programming language than NetLogo? The incomparable Ben Fried has translated all modeling code into JULIA, utilizing the excellent Agents.jl package. github.com/BenjaFried/m...

New preprint with @psmaldino.bsky.social on the evolution of similarity-biased learning: osf.io/preprints/so... This mathematical treatment both simplifies and extends our previous simulation treatment of the subject: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Great thread by @apvelilla.bsky.social about our new paper: "A Demographic Theory of Similarity-Biased Social Learning." We use mathematical modeling to explore the functional role played by identity markers in how we learn from others, and in the evolution of social learning more generally.

Short circuiting the learning process is the whole point of #AI. Users offload the "simple" or "mundane" thinking that nurtures growth. Students borrow its "understanding" and think that understanding is thiers. Use at the risk of stupidity. #academicsky phys.org/news/2026-02...

I'm thrilled to be joining the External Faculty at @csh.ac.at! Looking forward to my visit there later this Spring.

Hey linguists -- chickens can distinguish bouba and kiki: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I’d be looking forward to Unit VII’s lecture on “mechanisms of social control and order.”

some of you are looksmaxxing when you need to be booksmaxxing

“I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.” - 7 year old imprisoned by ICE for 70 days in a concentration camp in Texas. Today, after @propublica.org published this story, the camp was raided to confiscate letters from the children. www.propublica.org/article/ice-...

Back in 2019, I coded up Turchin's (2003) "metaethnic frontier" model of empire cycles in NetLogo. Despite its limitations it's pretty fun to watch the little empires come and go. I was recently asked about the code, so I uploaded it to ComSES. Enjoy. www.comses.net/codebases/15...

19 people.

Back in 2019, I coded up Turchin's (2003) "metaethnic frontier" model of empire cycles in NetLogo. Despite its limitations it's pretty fun to watch the little empires come and go. I was recently asked about the code, so I uploaded it to ComSES. Enjoy. www.comses.net/codebases/15...

Don't give anything an Emmy until it's as good as this.

This week, Clark Barrett takes us on a tour of different ways to think about the mental. youtu.be/HS9nypnRcfw?... podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e... www.podbean.com/eas/pb-j2ukn...

📖 Our book is out! 🎉 Computational Social Science of Social Cohesion and Polarization is published, openly and freely available at doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-01373-6 (1/3) #ComputationalSocialScience #Polarization #SocialCohesion #NetworkScience #ABM #TextAnalysis

Definitely seems plausible for some, seems unlikely to be the dominant narrative for most. Strategic ambiguity allows for multiple reasons under the same banner.

I had the most wholesome moment today---I requested @psmaldino.bsky.social's book from the library, and when I picked it up today, someone had left me a little note inside, saying that they'd love to meet to talk about it. Yay :)

ICE kidnapped 5 people from my community this morning. I don’t live in Minneapolis. I live in LA County. They’re still here and their still brutalizing.

If you fancy nerdy social science, & evolutionary approaches to psychology & behavior irk, anger, or excite you, check out this podcast. Hosts David Pinsof & @dpietra.bsky.social are two of the sharpest thinkers in ev psych, & their guest this week @psmaldino.bsky.social is a rising star 🧪 #BioAnth

I had a really nice time on the @epthepod.bsky.social podcast. Here you can listen to me blathering about evolutionary social science and some of the things I work on.

This week, we talk to @psmaldino.bsky.social about selection, the covert signalling of social identities, and how to think about models, science, and what it is we're all doing with our lives. youtu.be/0h9qAhwixJ4 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e... www.podbean.com/eas/pb-gkf6w...

“Bella Ciao”, translated and recorded by Tom Waits and Marc Ribot in 2018. m.youtube.com/watch?v=50Gv...

Sayre: "My background is in international humanitarian response in conflict zones in Yemen, Haiti, Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine. What I've seen here is what I've seen there. A powerful entity violently and intentionally terrorizing people."

I got into an argument with someone back around 2020 when I said the “thin blue line” flags were fascist symbols and should be actively condemned (they argued it was just supporting local cops). Well, here we are.

New paper from myself and many fantastic collaborators on the value of friction online social networks. A fun blend of principles from complexity science and social media design. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

A neat paper I worked on, begun over 2 years ago when our concerns were more myopic, was just published today. It came out an excellent set of workshops at the Santa Fe Institute, led by the indefatigable Joshua Garland. The gist: sometimes inefficiency is good for you www.nature.com/articles/s44...

One court decision, two different headlines. Guardian on the left, NY Times on the right. Which one more directly conveys information and the stakes to the reader?

Looking through Norbert Wiener's 1950 book "The Human Use of Human Beings," just now, this 2-paragraph passage jumped out at me from the first chapter. Extremely relevant to our troubling times.

Looking through Norbert Wiener's 1950 book "The Human Use of Human Beings," just now, this 2-paragraph passage jumped out at me from the first chapter. Extremely relevant to our troubling times.

“But what deeply troubles me now is that for all the steps we've taken toward integration, I've come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house."  Dr. King said this famous quote on March 27th, 1968, mere days before his murder. But the context around the quote is interesting...

what if we simply ate the president.

Never, in a million kabillion years, when I decided to say "screw it" to mainstream philosophy and started writing about the philosophy of games, could I have imagined that this road would take me down to having the goddamn NY Times profile me and my new book. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/b...

Reminder 📢 We are advertising a postdoctoral position in #philbio or #philphysics to work on an interdisciplinary project that adopts the lens of self-organization & active matter to explore the boundary between living and nonliving systems👇 www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo... #philjobs #philsci #evosky

so like.... that's just pollution then

Pluribus is a fascinating meditation on an extreme solution to the crux of all political economy: what's the best way to facilitaton cooperation among strangers? Anyway, here's a book I was going to write collapsed to 2500 words. economistwritingeveryday.com/2026/01/12/t...

Sadly, more relevant than ever. www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-...

The source of much online outrage, distilled in a pithy figure.

Many excellent points in this piece, including "The entire world is not legible to the Internet, and thus, the entire world is not legible to LLMs."